Distribution GatekeepingNarrow moat

The foundation of the App Store toll is a simple, powerful fact: Apple controls the only gate through which software can reach an iPhone. If a developer wants to put an app in front of the more than a billion people carrying iPhones, it must go through Apple's store, submit to Apple's review, and abide by Apple's rules¹. There is, on the iPhone, no other sanctioned way in — no rival store, no direct download — which makes Apple the sole doorkeeper to one of the most valuable audiences on earth² — more than 850 million people a week used the App Store in 2025⁴.

This gatekeeping power flows directly from Apple's control of the operating system. Because Apple decides what software may run on its devices, it can require that all of it pass through the App Store, and can reject or remove anything that breaks its rules. Apple justifies this control on grounds of security, privacy, and quality — and there is real substance to the claim that a curated, reviewed store is safer for ordinary users than an open free-for-all. But the same control that protects users also, not coincidentally, protects Apple's toll.

The strategic value of being the gate is that everyone who wants to reach the customer must deal with you on your terms. A developer cannot route around Apple to reach iPhone users, which means Apple sets the conditions of access — the rules, the review, and above all the commission — from a position of enormous leverage. Owning the only road to a valuable destination is one of the strongest positions in all of commerce, precisely because the travelers have no alternative route to take.

The gatekeeping is also the point of maximum tension, because it is exactly what regulators are now attacking. The demand that Apple permit alternative app stores and sideloading³ is, at bottom, a demand that it stop being the sole gate — and if that demand fully succeeds, the leverage on which the whole toll depends would be diminished. For now, though, the gate stands, and standing at it is what makes everything downstream of it possible.